Christmas Adjournment - Guantanamo Bay
As Members of the House know, the United States continues to detain hundreds of people in its naval facilities at Guantanamo Bay. The first of them were transferred there towards the end of 2001, so a number have been there for over three years. Originally there were nine UK nationals held in Guantanamo Bay. Fortunately, earlier this year five of them were released, but there are still four British passport holders there. They include Martin Mubanga, Feroz Abbasi, Moazzam Begg and Richard Belmar. Martin Mubanga, Feroz Abbasi and Richard Belmar are based in London, and I have had the privilege of meeting their families. The House of Commons needs to imagine what those families are going through this Christmas knowing that their loved ones are holed up in Guantanamo Bay with no immediate prospect of release.
As the US lawyer of one of the British detainees has said, these are individuals who have suffered a great deal of physical abuse, stress and torture, because—and this is the main point that I want to make to the House—all the evidence suggests that torture is going on in Guantanamo Bay. The essential position is this: by these detentions the United States Government have made a deliberate attempt to create a legal black hole into which they can place any foreigner for as long as they choose. The theory developed by Pentagon lawyers was that detainees held at Guantanamo could be treated entirely as the Executive saw fit. Indeed, in argument in the federal courts, the lawyer appearing for the United States authorities asserted that even torture, if it was perpetrated by the US authorities at Guantanamo, would not fall within the jurisdiction of civilian courts.
When the lawyer said that, the world did not know about the scandal of Abu Ghraib, but it is now clear that the disgraceful conduct there had its roots in an
interrogation system first developed and used at Guantanamo, and still, as far as we know, being used there. The techniques used there, as has come out in recent months, include stress; duress; manipulation by subjecting detainees to extremes of light and heat; threatening with dogs; attempts to force detainees to sign false statements; sexual assault; stripping; lengthy interrogation of detainees while they are shackled to the floor like dogs; failure to allow detainees to use toilet facilities with the result that they excrete on themselves; chaining detainees in a hog-tie position; mocking detainees' religious beliefs; and withholding basic items such as clothing and blankets.
It is no wonder that the Red Cross, which has the most access to the people held in Guantanamo, has dubbed that treatment torture. The treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, including the four British nationals to whom I referred, flouts every major human rights convention that the US and Britain have signed since the second world war. It also subverts the fundamental protections of liberty dating as far back as the 13th century and the Magna Carta. The Bush Administration, despite the findings of their own Supreme Court, continue to evade the application of any due process to the detainees. Guantanamo is the United States' domestic gulag.
We know from those British detainees who have been released, the young men who lived in Tipton, what is the US authorities' approach to evidence and confession. Two of the British detainees released, Rasul and Iqbal, had, according to the Americans, confessed to meeting Osama bin Laden and appearing in a video with him. Fortunately for them, MI5 established that their confessions, which the US insisted were genuine and could be the basis of a prosecution, were not only unreliable but false because there was a video showing that the two men, far from meeting Osama bin Laden, were working in a shop in Birmingham at the time. We can only imagine the sort of torture to which the two young men were subjected to force them to make confessions that could have resulted, had they not been released, in their losing their lives. We can only imagine the current conditions for British nationals and others who although not British nationals were British residents, and who are still held in Guantanamo Bay.
Even when one talks to Ministers, one encounters misconceptions about what is happening at Guantanamo Bay. One of the most common things one hears about the British nationals held at Guantanamo is that they are people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time—what were they doing in Afghanistan in the first place? It is important to note that two of them were not in Afghanistan at all: Martin Mubanga was arrested in Zambia and Moazzam Begg in Pakistan. The notion that George W. Bush and some Ministers like to put about, that the detainees were scooped from the killing fields of Afghanistan, is quite false. In that context, it is also important to remember that, at the commencement of the Afghanistan conflict, there was in the country a large community of aid workers and religious pilgrims who had no military intent. When the American forces offered huge financial rewards to local Afghans in exchange for the capture of foreign fighters, many of those people—simply because they were foreign, not because they had anything to do with al-Qaeda—were scooped up and handed over to obtain the money.
As for the security threat posed by the detainees, three years after America put them behind bars it seems clear that the only information coming out of Guantanamo Bay has been extracted in the form of confessions. Against the background of international organisations categorising the interrogation techniques used there as "tantamount to torture", and given that the confession made by Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal was proved to be false by MI5, there is real reason to believe that no weight can be attached to the information and that, furthermore, the confessions would not stand up in a court of law.
There was a time when no British Government would have stood by and allowed British nationals to be detained for so long without being charged and with no prospect either of being charged or of due process. No one is suggesting that the men should simply be released; all that is being suggested is that, as British nationals, they are entitled to due process. Yet despite the fact that Britain is supposed to be America's closest ally in the war against terrorism, we cannot even obtain due process for our own nationals. I believe that Guantanamo Bay, like Abu Ghraib, undermines the moral case presented for the war against terror.
I would not want to leave the subject of America's very own gulag without mentioning Belmarsh. We have heard what our own judges have had to say about the Muslim detainees at Belmarsh prison. At the weekend, newspapers reported that the evidence on which they are being held is mostly based on hearsay and guilt by association. I can do no better than quote what a Member of the other place said about the laws that led to the detention of those people in Belmarsh. Lord Hoffman said:
"The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these."
Whether the people in question are British nationals detained at Guantanamo Bay or the unfortunates detained in Belmarsh under laws that our own judges have stated are contrary to the European convention on human rights, it cannot be right, nor can it strengthen our war against terror, to hold people indefinitely without charging them or allowing them access to proper legal representation, and without due process. In the case of Guantanamo, we cannot ignore the serious allegations of torture. We, the British Parliament, must not let another Christmas go past with British nationals being held in that gulag in Cuba without due process and in the shadow of torture.
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